I am a lover of eggs.  Eating eggs, that is.  I appreciate the variety of meals that can be made with eggs.  Restaurants caught onto this and started putting eggs on hamburgers.  Oh yes, the value of that golden, runny yolk is something to behold.  You would think that with all my culinary experiences in making appetizers and main meals that I would have a stellar advantage when making myself eggs for breakfast.  Sadly, the truth remains that the simple egg always seems to find a way to make me fowl up (haha, get it?) my breakfast plan.

My initial favourite type of egg for breakfast was the over easy egg.  As a child, my mother would make this ideal breakfast for me.  Mom’s recipe:

1. Put a gallon of oil in the pan
2. Crack egg shell with side of fork and drop egg into swimming pool of oil
3. Use a spatula to splash boiling hot oil over the egg yolk
4. Remove egg once there is a white film on yolks and yolks are still runny

What would happen if a yolk broke?  Well, that was the end of my day.  (I still believe this to be true.)  I used to gently nudge my fork tines against that whitened outer yolk and watch as the liquid began cascading around the rest of the fried egg white.  Every part of that egg needed to have yolk on it.  Of course, there were many other ways that she prepared this delicacy.

Sometimes a soft boiled egg.  What if she over-cooked it and the yolk slightly hardened?  Doomsday.  Hard boiled eggs...yummy!  Devilled eggs were the bonus to the hardboiled egg.  Eggs and mayonnaise!   My heart is screaming listening to its arteries harden.  Scrambled.  I didn’t like scrambled eggs at first.  They always seemed rubbery and had no flavour.  That was until Breakfast Man came into my life.  My beloved Wiseguy is Breakfast Man!  He can make any kind of egg I desire and it’s PERFECTLY PERFECT every time!  (Maybe fate brought us together for just for this reason.)  What kind of breakfast can Breakfast Man make?

Scrambled eggs.  My goodness they are fluffy and creamy and buttery and…are you salivating yet?  Yes, they are that good.  Eggs over easy?  You can shake the plate and watch those yolks jiggle with delight.  Omelette.   When Breakfast Man makes a cheese omelette you never know what kind of surprise you will find inside.  Spinach?  Mushrooms? Peppers? Chunks of leftover barbecued chicken?  Genius!  The fridge is Wiseguy’s muse; waiting for him to pluck something from obscurity and lead it into Breakfast Nirvana.  I know, I know, I sound like I have never eaten eggs before, but when you have had eggs prepared by Breakfast Man, you would drool as well.  Now, I told you these wonderfully, appetizing tales to share with you what happened yesterday when my breakfast desire was to make a nice soft boiled egg.

I put the egg in the pot of boiling water.  The egg cracked!  Darn it!  I pulled out a second egg, lost my grip and it fell on the counter.  Slight crack.  AAAARRRRGHHHHH!  Well, I turned off the pot of water and decided to make sunny side up eggs.  So, I took out a THIRD egg to add to my hairline fractured egg in hopes that one of them would turn out with a nice, runny yolk.  I added butter to my pan and the two eggs.  They fried for a bit and put the lid on the pan to steam them.   I put a nice thick slice of bread into the toaster.  I made myself a tea.  I LOST TRACK OF TIME AND OVERCOOKED THE EGGS!  The whites were rubbery.  The yolks were hard.  Prediction:  crappy day.  I was irked by my failure to procure the perfect yolk.  I severed one of the eggs and put into a container hoping I’d MacGyver it tomorrow morning via breakfast sandwich.  I decided to add the boiled egg to that mess.  I started to peel off the shell and discovered that the yolk was soft.  Perfectly cooked.  How did I miss that?

I am sure you have had days like that.  You might be a horoscope reader so you peruse your prediction for the day.  It says you will have challenges.  What happens?  You fulfill that destiny.  You have a crappy day because your horoscope said so.  My awful eggs?  I was predicting that I would screw them up and so I thought I had.  In my despair I had actually overlooked the good that had happened by focusing on all the bad that I had endured.

I think life is like my egg cooking journey.  (It’s a stretch but follow along.)  There are so many things we want perfect in our lives.  Perfection means we have control and can make sure everything is in its place.  We wake up wanting to be happy, but more often than not, we focus on all the things that are wrong and that need to be fixed in order to make our lives better.  If we actually stopped and focused on all the marvellous things in our lives, we would find the gold nugget (or egg yolk).  That little thing that would put a smile on our faces and make the things that aren’t perfect seem less awful.  Nugget by little nugget, we would find our lives becoming happier and our imperfect nuggets would not be as devastating.  There may be hard cooked times you are going through, but there is also a soft centre that will make you happy and comfortable and appreciative.  (Ok, ok enough with the eggsplanations.  haha!)

“May your life always be sunny side up!”  I think that’s what my egg was trying to tell me.  Then again, it might have been laughing hysterically and thinking:  “Yolks on you!”  Either way, it got me smiling.